


ZONES

by costumejail



Series: Zone Five Quarantine Fair [6]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Alcohol, Drinking, Gen, One Shot, POV Second Person, also a very vague mention of vomiting and some violence, just mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24095920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/costumejail/pseuds/costumejail
Summary: BL/ind has always told you that life outside of Battery City was impossible, so you find out for yourself if that's actually true.
Series: Zone Five Quarantine Fair [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1730209
Comments: 13
Kudos: 13





	ZONES

**Author's Note:**

> Day six of the Zone Five quarantine fair by @killjoynest on tumblr!

Growing up in the city, you’re fed all kinds of propaganda about the zones. They’re a wasteland, the radiation can be lethal in minutes, bands of killjoys rove the sands looking for helpless victims to murder and rob, the temperatures can cook a man alive. BL/ind allows for desert visitation, but Zone One belongs more to the city then to the rebels, and it’s purposefully kept arid, dry, lifeless. It’s a warning for citizens that think they can survive outside of the city. 

You don’t listen.

You finally break out of the city, sneak out in the dead of night, engage in a high-speed chase with a squad of dracs, take a company-approved desert visitation and disappear. However you do it, you get out. Zone One is exactly as the company told you it would be. You feel your skin dry and crack in the unforgiving sun, your mouth gains a sour taste as you run out of water, if you see any signs of life it’s in vultures picking apart the corpse of a far less lucky creature. You worry you might be next.

But if you keep going, push through your exhaustion, impending heat stroke, dehydration, you start to notice changes. You hear bird calls that don’t sound like omens of doom. Maybe you stop in your tracks to watch a lizard rest in the shade of a boulder. A breeze picks up and for just a moment you breathe in clean, cool air, so unlike the perfect blend of filtered gases pumped throughout Battery City.

On the border of Zones One and Two, you come across a shack. Nothing special, four walls and a roof. Inside you find a stock of food, water, clothes that don’t fit you but are way more suited to the desert than what you have, and a radio tuned to 109 FMX, WKIL. You listen to the DJ’s voice, it’s rough. You can’t really tell if the crackle is because of the ancient radio or the man speaking out of it but something compels you to keep listening. At the end of his broadcast, you pick up the radio and press ‘Transmit.’ Your tongue feels heavy and you don’t know what to say, but the man on the other end just chuckles gently. Says to "hang tight, someone’ll come pick you up right quick." He tells you to “keep running,” even though he just told you to stay where you are, but he’s gone before you can ask what it means.

They won’t be your crew, it’s just a welcoming committee. You try to introduce yourself but they laugh, say that you don’t need that name anymore. They call you undergrad and you quickly realize that there’s a lot of new vocab you’re gonna have to pick up on if you want to understand anything that comes out of these people's mouths. You’ll get a new wardrobe and more often than not, an impromptu haircut, no one pushes you to pick a new name, but you’re already turning over possibilities in your mind. They teach you to fire a ray gun, but tell you you have to find your own. Quickly, you’ll learn the basics of life in the zones; finding water, which insects you can eat and how to cook them when all you have is a battery, a pack of gum, and some blood-soaked bandages, how to smell a storm in the air and take shelter before the wind whips up enough sand to tear the flesh from your bones, how to lace up your first pair of boots, a different way to lace up your boots, and another one for good measure. They’ll leave you in a Zone Three bar and tell you ‘keep running’ before vanishing in a cloud of dust.

What happens after that is up to you. Maybe you ask the barkeep if they need help wiping down the counter at the end of the night in exchange for a place to rest your head. Maybe you get in a fight with a rock ‘n roller that looks at you funny and end up with a busted lip and an invitation to ‘come rumble anytime you want.’ Maybe, just maybe, you get in a clap right out of the gate and if the Witch is on your side you come out of it with no more than a couple of burns and a shiny white ray gun. The most likely scenario is you get blisteringly drunk for the first time in your life off of some murky liquid that burns on both the way down and back up and you end up flat on your back in the dirt listening to some crash queens piss against the side of the bar. You wake up with a hangover, even if you don’t have the words to call it that, and you promise yourself you’re never gonna drink again.

Eventually, you get used to the desert. Find a name and slap it against as many walls as you can, paint your ray gun to match. You find a crew that you’d die for, and a few times you nearly do. You come to love the hot days and icy nights, the endless sky that burns orange at sunset and gives way to a blanket of diamond stars. You don’t come to love the cacti and their spines, but you learn to live with them. Every now and then you think about the city. You might be laid out on the hood of a car watching the stars, or in the middle of a firefight, or slamming back a mouthful of a drink you always regret come the morning, but you pause. You think about sitting in a sterile white classroom with headphones pumping bullshit about the ‘terrorists’ that ‘threatened Better Living Industries and every citizen of Battery City’ from the ‘uninhabitable zones’ and you laugh. Life in the zones isn’t easy, it’s not always fun, it’s almost never comfortable. But you found life in the desert where you’d always thought there was none and you found life in yourself that you didn’t know you contained.

**Author's Note:**

> I know all my fic is me projecting in some way but this is literally pure projecting my obsession with the desert and the freedom it has onto a second person POV so uhhhh it was probably a bit weird to read.  
> If you made it through, thanks for reading! As always, feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an ask at my tumblr @sleevesareforlosers.


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